Malin Ideland

This study focuses on what people working in edu-business want to achieve. The aim is to explore (1) how the edu-business sector is discursively constructed as a work-place and part of the education system, and (2) how this discourse is organized within an affective economy – that is how the valuation of emotions distinguish what are considered as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ subjectivities, practices, and institutions. The analysis draws on interviews with 22 people working in Sweden’s edu-business sector. The results illuminate three discourses: a bureaucratic, an entrepreneurial, and a profit discourse. Emotions attached to the bureaucratic discourse are anxiety, guilt, and boredom. Connected to the entrepreneurial discourse are joy, creativity, and well-being. Shame and pride are attached to the profit discourse. The affective economy constructs the business sector as desirable and the public sector as its opposite. Studying ‘the bright side’ of neoliberalism helps us to understand its power.

Vad är egentligen nyttig, relevant forskning? Vilken forskning kommer samhället bäst till gagn? Hur kan forskare inom det pedagogiska fältet bäst ta sig an olika samhällsutmaningar? Frågan är egentligen helt rimlig med tanke på den enorma mängd och bredd av samhällsutmaningar som står till buds. Men hur står det till med svaren i dagens skolforskning och-debatt? Ett samtida svar tycks sökas i den praktiknära forskningen (Ideland, kommande). Skolnyttig forskning sägs utgå från frågor som skolans personal formulerar utifrån sitt klassrum och svaret på frågan finns i samma kontext: i klassrummet, i lärarnas arbete och elevernas förutsättningar för goda kunskapsresultat. Detta framväxande paradigm var också i fokus för förra årets debatt-tema i Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige. Ett annat svar på frågan om nyttig forskning uppenbarar sig i de data som samlas in via plattformar och andra digitala verktyg-learning analytics och forskning för datadriven skolutveckling-det vill säga stora datamängder som kan brytas ner, analyseras och fungera som underlag för rekommendationer eller kanske till och med rena verktyg i form av AI-assistans för elevers lärande. I den svenska kontexten är det förstnämnda området idag det allra vanligaste svaret på vad som är nyttig forskning. Från policyhåll har detta initierats och stärkts under tjugohundratalet. Inte minst märks detta i vilka statliga utredningar som har publicerats och hur forskningsanslag har fördelats. År 2001 inrättades den Utbildningsvetenskapliga kommittén (UVK) vid Vetenskaps

Growing demands on evidence-based teaching, combined with increasing business involve-ment, constitute a transformation of education in which research and research collaborations have become commodities and selling points for companies. This article, building on interviews with 30 Swedish edupreneurs, explores how the discursive trope of the Triple Helix organises collaborations between the business sector, research, and school. In what ways do people in edu-business use research and research collaborations and what kinds of values do they expect to produce through different practices? The study identifies five approaches to research – philanthropists, influencers, ambassadors, brokers, and engineers – and describe the edupreneurs’ manifold ways of using, relating to, and translating research into sellable products. Using the theoretical lens of assetization, we show how different values are produced: (1) economic – strengthening the company’s brand; (2) pedagogical – changing teaching practices; (3) political – lobbying for policy change and changing public conversations; (4) academic – defining useful research and funding research, and (5) social – building networks. We conclude that the striving for Triple Helix collaborations preserves the entrepreneurial right to define useful research and providing legitimacy through the power of research, an important asset on the edu-market.

Utbildning AB : Villkor och konsekvenser för en marknadiserad skola : Rapport från ett forskningsprojekt

This article analyzes how a figuration of the teacher is made up within an ed-tech discourse and how it organizes how we think of teaching. It departs from an interview study with 25 ‘edupreneurs’ selling hardware, software, and/or professional development regarding digital tools to Swedish schools. The analysis illuminates how the ‘desired teacher’ is similar to what is conceptualized as a Silicon Valley culture, privileging characteristics valued in the IT sector. Such a teacher coaches rather than lectures, is flexible, and ready to work whenever and wherever. S/he customizes his/her work to the individual student and his/her needs of knowledge, location, and timeframes, emphasizing that education is a personal business. ‘Boring’ parts of the work (grading and assessment) are believed to be taken over by technology. The teacher should be the one promising fun and creativity in order to educate dreamers for the future and workers in a knowledge economy. With help from Castells’ theory of the network society, the study illuminates and discuss what this means for how we can think of school in terms of teacher authority, place and time. It also claims that a commercialized, neoliberal rationale is made possible in schools through the platforms.

Nature of science (NOS) has increasingly been emphasized as an important element in science education. This paper engages in the question of how teachers negotiate different approaches to and contexts for NOS teaching. This exploratory study is part of a three‐year longitudinal project where six in‐service teachers developed and negotiated their NOS‐teaching practices. Pickering's (1995) theory of the mangle of practice is used for the analysis of teachers’ focus‐group discussions. In a mangled practice, school science traditions, policy documents, and students’ and teachers’ expectations and identities are rubbed against each other. As part of the project teachers planned, implemented, and reflected on two NOS activities at different levels of contextualization. The concepts alignment, resistance, and accommodation are used as an analytical tool to understand the processes of the mangle in relation to teachers’ negotiations concerning the two activities during the focus groups. The results of the mangle are presented in relation to a backdrop of three teaching traditions (facts, lab‐work, and discussions) that the teachers’ claim to depart from. The results show how the alignment and resistance of different components of the mangle lead to various accommodations as regards both the activities and the three traditions. The article concludes by discussing how the teachers’ negotiations highlight what becomes possible and what becomes challenging when NOS meets existing traditions, and what this means in respect of possibilities for NOS learning.

Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio-technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an ‘imagination laboratory’, a space through which un-framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, enabling sense-making and offering fantastic connections otherwise not articulated. In this article, the framework of ‘bio-objectification’ is enriched with Bennett's (2001) notion of enchantment and the importance of wonder and openness to the unusual, in order to highlight alternative matters of concern than articulated through conventional politico-moral discourse. Drawing on a cultural sociological analysis of Eduardo Kac's Edunia, Lucy Glendinning's Feather Child, Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells and Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Stranger Visions, we discuss how the intermingling of art, science, critics, art historians, science fiction, internet, and physical space, produce a variety of attachments that this article will unpack. The article demonstrates that while some modern boundaries and rationalities are highlighted and challenged through the ‘imagination laboratory’ of the art process, others are left untouched.